Over the past several years, greater amounts of money have been spent by companies on marketing strategies and advertising. Advertising may typically be presented to consumers through various mediums, such as radio, television, print, and/or the Internet. To make this advertising most effective, companies may attempt to target their advertising efforts on consumers who are most likely to be interested in the advertised product or service. By only targeting the most interested consumers, greater sales and revenues may be appreciated by the companies, while decreasing advertising costs.
Various methods may be implemented by companies to identify the most interested consumers. In order to effectively target these consumers, information about them must be known or collected. As one example, with respect to the Internet, behavioral data may be collected about the consumers through monitoring of the websites that they visit and the content presented on those websites. For example, a user that visits many travel-related websites may be better targeted with an advertisement for a travel package to Australia than a user that visits many home improvement websites. However, this type of targeting may not be the most effective, because only a small percentage of users that regularly visit travel-related websites may actually consider or be able to afford the travel package to Australia.
In another example, with respect to television, demographics data may be collected about viewers and related to the content or timing of the programs they view in order to target advertisements. For example, statistics may be collected showing that 75% of viewers of a home improvement show are men. Thus, a commercial for men's clothing may be better suited for broadcast during the home improvement show than another show with only 35% male viewership. However, this type of targeting may also not be the most effective, because it does not consider the propensity of the male viewers of the home improvement show to purchase new clothing.
Given these drawbacks, advertisement targeting may be improved by considering accumulated information related to a consumer's spending habits. Thus, some retailers have implemented loyalty programs to track the spending behavior of their customers. However, these loyalty programs are only capable of tracking purchases made at their respective retailers. Although cross-retailer loyalty programs exist, they are only capable of tracking purchases made at participating retailers. Thus, a participating retailer would have no knowledge of a customer's purchase history at non-participating retailers. Nevertheless, many customers would be hesitant to share their identities and full spending histories with a retailer for privacy reasons.